Wednesday, July 12, 2006

How's Press Tour going so far? Hard to say. It's certainly been a long day. First my car wouldn't start, but I'm not a AAA member. Fortunately, they don't care when you join so long as you give them money, so I became a AAA member and just as quickly asked them to direct me to roadside assistance. Dead battery the guy says. He charges it and sends me on my way. I get to Pasadena and turn off my car and just for fun check to see if it's OK. Nope. Dead. Another call to AAA. Another lengthy wait. The battery's dead. Not rechargeable dead, but dead-dead. Long story short, I missed the late morning sessions. I missed the early afternoon sessions. But I have an expensive new battery in my car.

And I made it to Press Tour in time for HBO and, thus, the HBO goodie bag, always a highlight.

This is gonna be a post on the Zap2it press tour blog, but we're having posting problems, so it'll have to migrate:

There's a blue towel in the HBO goodie bag. That, in and of itself, isn't particularly interesting, nor is the quality of the towel, which goes down as better than the towel FOX gave us for "Quintuplets" two years ago, but not as good as the bright red one TNT gave us at some point.

The issue is, why a towel? Yes, the towel says "Entourage" on it and may relate back to the fact that "Entourage" is a summery show, like the televisual equivalent of a trip to the beach on a sunny warm day.

It seems like somebody at HBO might have looked at the rest of the network's TCA slate and decided that maybe the gift might be misconstrued. After all, in addition to "Entourage," HBO's presentations include Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina doc "When the Levees Broke" and the self-explanatory miniseries "Tsunami, the Aftermath." That's two different water-themed disaster epics, two situations in which a towel might be useful, but probably eventually superfluous -- band-aid for a bullet-hole sort of stuff.

nothing like the universe telling you to recharge your batteries -- or start over and buy a new one. if you were more superstitious, you might've used this as the occasion on which to negotiate your next paid vacation from zap2it. say, 2 weeks on fiji after the press tour? you'll want your towel there, too. douglas adams tells all hitchhikers of the universe that, pace AMEX, it's the one thing you mustn't leave home without. (::end geek::) (omg, blogger wouldn't let me use a fake html tag format for that last remark.)